How to Track Influencer Marketing Success: 6 Effective Ways

Influencer marketing may have quickly become one of the most popular methods of digital marketing. However, it’s far from perfect, and one of the major reasons for that is the fact that marketers still don’t know how to track influencer marketing effectively. In fact, measuring influencer marketing ROI is a major challenge for 52% of marketers.

Why do you need to track influencer marketing?

By tracking influencer marketing success, you’ll be able to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. This can help you make more informed decisions in the future to boost your influencer marketing campaigns. It’s perhaps due to this reason that nearly 39% of brands in the USA would be more likely to invest in influencer marketing if they could measure its overall impact on business growth.

So, before we get into how to track influencer marketing, let’s take a look at some of the metrics you need to measure to determine the success of your influencer campaigns.

Pro Tip: Decide on the goals of your influencer marketing campaigns and measure your success based on them.

Which Metrics Should You Track for Influencer Marketing Success?

Here are some of the metrics that you should use for influencer tracking:

1. Input

Input includes the activities that you undertake in the identification phase of your influencer marketing campaigns. These include activities such as:

Social media influencer outreach

Inviting influencers to your events

Sending out invites for your influencer program

Asking employees to become influencers

To get your input metrics right, you need to understand which social channels your target audience is active on. This is essential because it’s on the basis of this that you can find influencers who can reach them.

Partnering with influencers on social platforms other than those where your audience is active, may not be beneficial. This is because you won’t be able to reach your target audience through the influencer campaign.

To find influencers on the social platform of your choice, you can use our influencer marketing platform, Fourstarzz Media. It lets you filter out influencers based on the social channels, reach, engagement rates, and even audience interests. You can also leverage our advanced search features such as hashtag search, influencer mentions, handles, and names.

2. Output

Output includes the activities that have actually converted into engaged and activated influencers.

Some of the things you need to measure when it comes to your output are:

How many influencers accepted your invitations to the events?

How many influencers turned up for your event?

How many influencers joined your influencer program?

How many influencers engaged with your brand once you messaged them?

How many relationships did you manage to build?

Measuring these things will help you figure out how effective your efforts were during the initial stages of your influencer marketing campaigns.

3. Outcomes

The outcomes of influencer marketing campaigns deal with the final results of the campaign. These include metrics like engagement, brand awareness, sales, lead generation, etc. Outcomes of your influencer campaign are usually related to the campaign goal. For instance, if your campaign goal is to generate sales, the result of the influencer campaign should be more conversions and sales.

Engagement

Engagement is one of the most important metrics that you need to measure when you want to find the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaigns. It’s essentially a measure of how well your target audience has received your influencer’s content.

Engagement Rate: Engagement rate is one of the most important metrics to track your influencer marketing efforts. It gives you an idea of the percentage of the influencer’s audience who interacted with your sponsored post. You can find the engagement rate by using the following formula:

Click-Through Rate (CTR): This is yet another important parameter that you need to measure for engagement. Through it, you can figure out the percentage of your target audience that took the action you desired them to take. You can find the click-through rate by using the following formula:

Cost Per Click (CPC): CPC is yet another influencer engagement metric that helps you find out the cost you incurred for every click that you get on your link in the influencer’s post. The lower this cost, the better it is for you. You can find the cost per click by using the following formula:

Awareness

When your goal is to build awareness for your brand, you need to track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to awareness for influencer marketing. Some of the important ones you need to measure are:

Reach: The reach of your influencer campaign shows you how many people may have potentially seen the post created by the influencer. Nearly 59% of brands tracked the reach of their influencer campaigns in 2019 to figure out if they were successful. The potential reach of every campaign is equivalent to the number of followers the influencers have.

Impressions: It’s difficult to estimate the exact reach of a campaign, so it’s better to track the impressions if you’re looking for a more precise answer. This gives you an idea of the number of times people saw your post.

Audience Growth: Yet another important awareness metric to track influencer marketing is that of audience growth. It essentially shows you how many new followers you’ve got through the influencer marketing campaign.

Traffic

Influencer campaigns can also help drive traffic to your website. This traffic boost can help you ramp up your lead generation and sales. While it’s essential to track the number of clicks on the website link and calculate the click-through rate, it’s also necessary to check the growth in website traffic.

But, why?

This is because the link clicks may not always convert into website traffic. Some of the people who’ve clicked the links may bounce away before your site opens. This is perhaps the reason why nearly 40% of brands track website traffic to determine influencer marketing success.

Image via IAB

Sales

One of the most important metrics you need to track for influencer marketing campaigns is your sales. The end goal of any business is to generate revenue and sales from marketing, so it’s necessary to measure these aspects.

Lead Generation: This KPI gives you an idea of the number of new leads generated from your influencer campaign. When you get more targeted leads, your chances of getting more sales from them increase as well.

Sales: Sales is a straightforward KPI that you need to track for influencer marketing campaigns. It gives you an idea of the number of sales that your influencer campaign has generated.

Revenue: Finally, the revenue generated from your influencer marketing campaign is something you need to track as well. This can help you figure out the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign in monetary terms.

Content Generated

Content generation is yet another important metric you need to track for your influencer marketing efforts. When an influencer posts content related to your brand online, chances are that their social media followers may end up creating content around the same topic as well. They might even use your branded hashtags in their content marketing efforts.

The earned media value generated by this content can help you increase your brand awareness and authority.

SEO Impact

When a social media influencer incorporates your website link into their posts, many of their followers may click on it and go to your website. This can help increase your page views. Additionally, the highly-targeted traffic means that your time on site and bounce rate metrics will be impacted positively.

So, what does this do?

This can help improve your SEO. Not just that, when social media influencers add links to your website in their blog posts, it can get you some valuable backlinks and traffic. This can improve your SEO as well.

Now that you know which metrics you need to track, let’s take a look at how to track influencer marketing success.

How Can You Track Influencer Marketing Success?

Let’s dive in to understand how to track influencer marketing success.

1. Trackable Links for Sales, Lead Generation, and Subscriptions

Trackable links can help you measure your sales, leads generated, and subscriptions. Using them, you can track where your users are coming from, and this can give you a clear idea of how well your influencer campaign is performing. All you need to do is share these affiliate links with your influencers.

Let’s take a look at how to set up trackable links to determine the effectiveness of your campaign:

Here are the steps you need to follow to then create your trackable links:

1. Enter your website URL.

2. Add Campaign Source, Campaign Medium, Campaign Name

3. Copy the generated affiliate links and share them with your influencers.

4. You can then set up a Goal in Google Analytics for any of the following (Tracking traffic won’t need a separate goal).

Contact form submissions

Newsletter subscribers

Product purchases

5. Open Google Analytics and head to Acquisition -> Campaigns -> All Campaigns and select your goal. This will bring up the exact figures based on the chosen goal.

2. Social Data

If you want to measure metrics like engagement, brand awareness, and content generated from your social media marketing efforts, you can check your social media analytics.

Each social media platform has its own built-in analytics tools that you can use for this. All you need to do is open your social media accounts and head to the analytics section.

Not sure where to start?

You can check the influencer’s sponsored posts and find out the number of likes, comments, and shares. For tracking content generation, you can check how many posts have been created using your branded hashtag and find out your earned media value.

Additionally, you can find out your follower growth using social media analytics tools. However, for the other metrics, you need to have access to the influencer’s social media account.

So, what can you do?

A great way of going about this is by asking the influencer to send their analytics to you. This can help you find out your reach, the number of impressions, clicks, CTR, and even CPC.

3. Promo Codes to Measure Sales

Yet another method of tracking your sales is by providing unique promo codes to your influencers. When any of their social media followers use these promo codes when they’re purchasing your products, you’ll be able to track the sales.

But how can you do so?

To track the sales, you can utilize POS systems that support promo codes. Alternatively, you can use tools such as Voucherify and Vouchery.io to track the sales generated through promo codes.

4. Subscriber Database Growth

Tracking the number of email newsletter subscriptions is fairly easy if your email marketing platform has a built-in analytics tool. You can use these analytics to determine the number of new newsletter subscriptions.

5. Measuring Input

Input is the activities that you do at the beginning of your influencer campaign. Hence, measuring your input requires that you track the activity and effort that your team is putting into the campaign.

The number of employees you’ve reached out to get on board for an employee advocacy program

These factors are some of the most basic ones and are the first steps you need to take to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaign. If your campaign doesn’t do well, you might need to improve your marketing strategy and input activity.

6. Measuring Output

The output of your influencer marketing campaign is essentially the results of your input activity. Hence, measuring them requires that you track how your input has led to you getting engaged and active influencers on board.

Here are some of the questions that you need to answer to measure the output of your influencer campaign.

How many influencers responded to your outreach messages or emails?

How many influencers accepted your invitation to the event?

How many influencers actually turned up for your event?

How many influencers joined your influencer marketing program?

How many employees have started posting about your brand?

Answering these questions can help you track your output.

7. Check Your Site Analytics

While it can be difficult to find out the exact impact of the influencer campaign on your SEO, you can get a rough idea by going through your website analytics. For this, you can head to Google Analytics.

What should you look out for?

Check your referral traffic to figure out how much traffic the influencer is driving from their post or website. Additionally, you can look into other metrics of this traffic to figure out its effectiveness. These include:

Time on site

Bounce rate

Pages per session

Pageviews

Next, you can figure out the quality of traffic that the influencer is driving to your website. You can also check the impact that the traffic has on the average of these metrics, and you can compare them to those before the campaign. This can give you an idea of how the campaign has affected your website’s SEO positively.

Now that you understand how to track influencer marketing success, here’s a template that you can use for your campaign tracking.

Template For Tracking Influencer Marketing Success

Ready to Get Started Tracking Your Influencer Marketing Success?

To figure out how well your influencer campaign’s performing, it’s essential to track it. You need to monitor your campaign’s input, output, and outcomes and analyze them to find out where you stand.

While the input and output require you to track your own activity and its results, the outcomes require you to monitor the results of the influencer’s efforts. You need to check metrics like engagement, brand awareness, traffic, sales, the content generated, and the SEO impact from the campaign.

Now that you know how to measure influencer marketing success, start looking for influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns now using Fourstarzz Media. Subscribe now for $59/month. Cancel anytime.